In one of their year 2000 papers—Rules of Thumb in Data Engineering, Jim Gray and Prashant Shenoy stated that, “Over the last decade, disk pages have grown from 2KB to 8KB and poised to grow again. In ten years, the typical small transfer unit will probably be 64KB, and large transfer units will be a megabyte or more.”   Should we ...

Alan Cranfield on the SSWUG list alerted me to a paper by Mike Stonebraker and folks, proclaiming the end of the current relational database architecture that is generally embraced by all the major commercial relational DBMS and annoucing that a far better paradigm would be based on specialized engines. You can find the paper ...

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a diverse array of issues ranging from studying SQL Server performance on various multi-core processors, pondering the implications of many-core processors, troubleshooting SQL Server performance problems, looking at the scalability of Oracle RAC and Sybase shared-disk clusters, and so ...

There seems to be a consensus that we are at an important inflection point in computing because of the emerging trend towards multicores on a chip near term and manycores on a chip in a not so distant future. If you are writing software, you need to have a solid understanding of what this means, or you’d be left behind.   If you are a user ...

Right now, flash memory-based solid state drives are still more expensive than traditional disk drives in terms of the cost per gigabyte. But flash-based drives or some type of hybrid that combines both flash and traditional disk drives seem to be coming. There have been a lot of talks about the potential impact of flash memory in general. But I ...

A significant part of my job is to evaluate how SQL Server (and sometimes other DBMSs) performs on various hardware platforms, in particular on the processors and its related chipsets as they are being released. So naturally, I’ve been paying attention to performance analysis of DBMSs.   One of the papers at the top of my reference ...

The best documentation on the I/O behavior of SQL Server checkpoints is found in SQL Server 2000 I/O Basics by Bob Dorr. In particular, you should read the following carefully: SQL Server uses the following steps to set up another page for flushing and repeats for up to 16 total pages inclusive of the first page. Do a hash lookup for the ...

SQL Server 2005 does not support hash partition as a product feature. But that doesn't mean you can't apply the concept of hash partition in your application or database design. Recently, I worked on an application that used SQL Server to persist the customized ASP.NET session state information, similar to the SQL Server mode for ASP.NET session ...

Haven't we heard enough about AWE and 3GB? Yes, I bet you have, and I won't bore you with regurgitating any second-hand information or rehashing any Microsoft documentation or whitepapers. Instead, I'll give you my test results to highlight how much buffer pool memory a 32-bit SQL Server 2005 instance can consume for each combination of the ...

When it comes to the issue of 32-bit vs. x64, you can easily walk away from a presentation with an impression that going to x64 will most likely give your SQL Server application a performance boost. I'd like to show you--with some test data--that you should be careful with that impression. The following three environments were tested on exactly ...